


Miss Maudie Moves Plants Around, A Fire Happens

by Wheelchair_Atticus_is_Bae



Category: To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Genre: Does that mean I should tag this with Major Character Death?, Fire, Other, POV Third Person Omniscient, Spoiler Alert: The House Dies, This is a rewriting of an event from Chapter 8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 14:52:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19111930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wheelchair_Atticus_is_Bae/pseuds/Wheelchair_Atticus_is_Bae
Summary: Basically what happens is Miss Maudie from To Kill A Mockingbird (by Harper Lee) moves her plants around for like two pages and then there's a fire. Trigger warning for fire? It's not that intense and no humans die. This is a rewriting of an event that happened in the 8th chapter. I wrote this for my 10th grade English final. It's the first "fan fiction" I've ever wrote. Feedback is fine, be as mean if you want. If you want to talk about how much you love Atticus hmu





	Miss Maudie Moves Plants Around, A Fire Happens

Miss Maudie lived in an old house. Its floorboards creaked, its ceilings leaked, and its walls let in the cold winter air. She lived in a big house. Excessively big, for just one person to inhabit. So big that she didn’t have nearly enough room in her yard for her precious azaleas, she would complain to her visitors. And lastly, the house was cold. It sat in the still winter air and let the snow fall and pile on its roof, but it was so cold that the snow might as well have been drifting through the roof and walls and settling on the living room floor. It was the cold that started it all.

 

Miss Maudie had no trouble wrapping herself in blankets and muttering a few mild curses under her breath before falling into an almost comfortable sleep, but tonight the temperature fell below freezing, and the snow stuck as it hadn’t done in the little southern town of Maycomb since 1885. Miss Maudie had been gardening for years and knew exactly what would happen if she left her plants outside overnight.

 

Before even stepping foot in her bedroom she pulled on a coat and went to retrieve the six plants that she grew on the porch in the wintertime. After three trips she finally dropped the last of the plants onto the floor in the dining room, and with a sigh tugged off her coat and headed to her bedroom. As soon as her coat was off, however, she froze, three paces away from her bedroom door. Miss Maudie had almost forgotten how ineffective the walls of the huge, empty house were. She stood, staring at her bedroom door, considering what, if anything, to do. She turned slowly to gaze at the kitchen door, then at the six plants next to the door leading to the porch outside. Three identical, heavy wooden doors. 

 

Miss Maudie made up her mind. She marched briskly back towards her plants, shuddering at the cold of the wooden floorboards against the soles of her feet. She heaved up two plants, one in each arm, and tottered towards the kitchen door. The floor beneath her creaked loudly, as if in protest. She pushed against the heavy door with great effort before it gave way and she nearly fell into the room. Dropping the plants down on the kitchen counter, she immediately flew back to make the next necessary trips to collect the rest of her plants. 

 

She moved quickly, almost running back to the dining room and slowly stomping from the weight of the potted plants back to the kitchen, upsetting the usual stillness of the quiet house. 

 

Miss Maudie was tired in the most frantic of ways. When she had successfully relocated all the potted plants into the kitchen, she didn’t even hesitate to catch her breath before loading them, hardly thinking, onto the stove. She was too tired to even notice that she was now working on the red rug that covered part of the kitchen floor, and her feet were significantly less cold than they were seconds ago. 

 

The house around her seemed to have given up protesting. It slumped dejectedly, Miss Maudie’s chaotic work seeming only to affect one room. Not that Miss Maudie had noticed, but the house suddenly felt resigned, its furniture sitting weakly upright, its drapes hanging sullenly from the windows. The snow on its roof seemed to be crushing the house slowly, suffocating it.

 

Miss Maudie was completely ignorant of these changes. She was not as young and strong as she had once been, but she made quick work of hauling the plants onto the stove and turning on the heat, before tromping to her room and falling into bed. 

 

The house was still for hours. The blocks of wood that made up the building shifted and groaned in the cold air. The halls were dark and long. The rooms were silent and stationary. It was as if the house was holding its breath. In the kitchen, the flames from the stove threw their light around the room, casting strange shadows. The fire licked the bottoms of the pots with long red and orange tendrils. 

 

A long leaf from one of the plants tumbled suddenly into the flames, catching fire before dropping to the kitchen floor. It burned out after a few seconds and all was calm again for a second more. The house was still and dark for only a moment.

 

Then, seeming to happen much faster this time: a second leaf fell, catching fire on the way down, before falling, this time onto the red rug that covered part of the kitchen floor. The fire spread over the rug. It jumped up onto the drape covering the kitchen window. Climbed the walls. Crawled across the floor.

 

The fire advanced quickly across the house. Miss Maudie woke, choking on the smoke, and dashed in silent terror out the front door. The smoke billowed to the ceilings and burst violently out the windows. 

 

People were gathering around to gawk at the disaster. A few men broke their way through the windows, invading the house in an effort to save what valuables and furniture they could.

 

The house stood silently, letting the crackling of the fire consuming it be the only noise emitted. It glowed from the inside and stared right on back at the bystanders who watched in horror. It fell honorably, the ash of the wreckage mingling with the heavily falling snow.

 

Of the onlookers were most of the town, groups of men and women grouped together to watch. A boy and his sister stared, oblivious to a man behind them dropping a blanket onto the girl’s shoulders and then promptly disappearing. As the firefighters and helpful scavengers finally backed away from the burning house, the figure standing closest to it was Miss Maudie. She was poised, frozen, with a blank look on her face and her fingers clutching a blanket around herself, the flames not enough for her to ward off the cold. The only remorse she had in her heart was for her potted plants burning on the stove. “Gives me more yard,” she would say the next morning. “Just think, I’ll have more room for my azaleas now!”


End file.
